“If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?”
—Frederick Douglass, “The Color Question”
William H. Holcombe’s A Mystery of New Orleans: Solved by New Meth-ods (1890) mobilizes the same detective conventions Hopkins exploits (the
“whoizzit,” the problem of temporal reconstruction and forensic skepticism)
to examine possibilities for interracial sociability in the post- Reconstruction era. hough A Mystery of New Orleans depicts the Civil War as an event that tore at the loyalties of white men, it takes for granted that emancipation was its chief accomplishment. Hopkins’s bleak ending contrasts with Hol-combe’s more optimistic picture of reunion culture, which initially merges regional reconciliation and interracial union in its romance plot— though at the end of the day it can’t quite stomach the latter. And while Holcombe’s more “enlightened” characters initiate exhaustive dialogues about the prob-lems of so- called racial degeneration and prospects for racial equality, these conversations and their verdicts are restricted to white men. Like Hagar’s Daughter, A Mystery of New Orleans manifests forensic skepticism; the novel calls into question the ordinary evidence of the eyes and ears and recog-nizes black Americans as historical and genealogical authorities. Signii-cantly, however, A Mystery of New Orleans substitutes another astonishing epistemology in place of forensics: a theory of metaphysical testimony that corroborates every crime and psychic specialists who exhume the past. Yet for Holcombe, even these psychic powers cannot contest new, paranormal forms of slavery. Nevertheless, A Mystery of New Orleans foregrounds the value of detection’s devices for exploring familial, racial, and sectional identi-ties in the post- Reconstruction era.
A Mystery of New Orleans is the story of a belated investigation into the fate of a man named Gordon Clarke, and like Hagar’s Daughter, Hol-combe’s novel hinges on events that took place during the Civil War and in its wake. Torn between states’ rights and national sovereignty, having been taught “the universal political creed of the South from homas Jeferson to Jeferson Davis” but nevertheless “devotedly attached” to the Union, Gordon Clarke split the diference and “expatriated” himself from the nation in a time of civil dispute (Holcombe 10). In spite of all his political dithering, however, this patriot’s true fealty was to the markets. When, after the Battle of Gettysburg, the end of the war seemed inevitable and close, Clarke “began speculating on the diferences between gold and greenbacks, and realized a large sum” (11)— having already made a fortune as a “successful speculator” in California when he turned abroad and began dabbling in mining ventures in Mexico and Costa Rica. Finally, his thirst for capital landed him in Havana, where his wife and eldest child were (heavy- handedly) stricken with yellow fever. When Clarke and his remaining two- year- old daughter Sarah disap-peared in the vicinity of New Orleans, his brother Ephraim had to entertain the far- fetched proposition that Clark decided to “pocket his fortune and sail for Europe or the tropics, abandoning friends and country forever” (17).
A young architect from Chicago who goes by the name of Hugh Stan-ford is enlisted to track down Gordon Clarke and his daughter some twenty years after their disappearance, now that the money held in trust for Clarke’s heir has blossomed from twenty thousand to a half million dollars. Stan-ford’s expedition is barely under way when he becomes infatuated with the southern beauty Ninette Du Valcourt. A few chapters in it is evident to the reader that Ninette is none other than the mislaid Sarah Clarke, though it takes Stanford a couple hundred pages and the assistance of the city’s emi-nent black medium Cora Morette to reach this fairly parsimonious solution.
In the meantime, Stanford divides his time between romantic pursuits and psychical phenomena. Colonel Du Valcourt toasts Stanford’s plans to wed his adopted daughter Ninette; to boot, “an additional bumper was conse-crated to the perpetual Union of the States and of all true lovers, North and South” (120). However, the prospect of blissful North- South nuptials is foiled by a lurry of insinuations about the origins of Du Valcourt’s hand-some daughter. Stanford’s proposed “romance of reunion” is most irregular, since it would join a white man with a woman suddenly suspected to be black, in a metropolis so baled by the question of race that a tarnished bronze statue of the nation’s “Great Compromiser” invites a little girl to in-quire of her mother, “Was Henry Clay a black man?” (163).
It happens that old Caesar, an octogenarian and the last living descen-dent of the Du Valcourt slaves, is proprietor of the family’s genealogy, and it is Caesar who corroborates Rose Villemaine’s suspicions of the illegitimacy of her stepsister Ninette. Caesar insists that “dare ain’t a spect of Valcourt blood in her veins, anyhow, sho’” (87). Even if Caesar maintains that Ninette is positively “some orphing or picked- up chile,” however, Villemaine’s only evidence that Ninette’s ancestry is racially suspect is a printed remark in the conidential iles of the orphanage where Ninette was deposited as a child.
Nevertheless, and with no little assistance from Villemaine, rumors begin to ly, and soon Ninette’s name is acquainted with those vulgarities that roll of the tongues of aluent clubmen. She is denigrated by their language and soiled by their looks. hough her name was never on any bill of sale, to them her person is, even in an age past slavery, for purchase. One of this scurrilous lot takes note that “when a woman falls a hair’s- breadth below the white line, like Miss Du Valcourt, she becomes the legitimate prey of any clubman who can meet the expenses” (207). As was the case with Hopkins’s Jewel, that
“hair’s breadth,” or one drop— and in this case the faulty gossip of that one drop, since Ninette has the good fortune to be free of even a particle of black blood— turns New Orleans’s elite against her.
While she is not exactly ousted from the family seat, Ninette obliges po-lite society and expels herself. Lethe Maxwell, the black woman who could well be the girl’s grandmother, consoles Ninette that, “although she could not go to the opera at night in full- dress, she could attend all the matinées, to which every one was admitted” (200). But Holcombe proposes that the ulti-mate dilemma of the color line can be summarized in a single “test- question”:
Shall we permit a beautiful, educated, reined, virtuous young woman, so far white as to be indistinguishable from ourselves in physical or men-tal qualities, to be stricken from our rank, which she has so charmingly adorned and can still adorn, and to be consigned irrevocably to the de-graded social conditions of the inferior race? (252)
he substance of racial diference, or rather the diiculty of substantiat-ing it, is the crux of the matter, and if Holcombe repeatedly suggests that race is no observable fact, he does not go so far as to suggest it is not a genuine fact. For instance, he writes that “none but a connoisseur could have detected the slightest trace of African descent” in the light- skinned Emily Gordon, the bona ide black woman who is allegedly Ninette’s birth mother (297). It is worth noting, moreover, that a specialist of some skill is also required to make sense of regional linguistic diferences. Upon his arrival in New Or-leans Stanford concludes that dialect in the novels of George Washington Cable is artless and crude; indeed, English spoken by Creoles is so faultless that “only the most attentive and cultivated ear could detect any deviation from the standard” (58). he ininitesimal variations on standard English, the subtleties of accent and intonation are merely “nuances,” which is to say that “they never could be transferred to paper, or represented by any possible species of bad spelling” (58)— and to say otherwise is mere prejudice. More chivalrous by far than the spineless Cuthbert Sumner, Stanford stands by Ninette, albeit after he is assured by a medical professional that “children of such marriages” do not “have a tendency to revert to the lower or darker type” (193).
Strangely enough, this northerner who fervently defends the “spiritual solidarity of the human race and in the inal composite union of all the races”
is also the champion of a supernatural forensics that can verify racial pedi-gree and, in this case, avert interracial marriage. In Holcombe’s own idea of a happy ending Ninette is heir to the Clarke fortune and decidedly not “a ne-gress” (198). But throughout the novel the question of racial “amalgamation”
poses a strange challenge to Stanford’s “new metaphysics.” As Stanford in-vestigates Clarke’s disappearance, he wholeheartedly contends that no past is past; he insists that every “antecedent phenomena” makes a permanent impression in the “psychic ether”; all “sights, sounds, thoughts, deeds” leave their marks, though these may not be perceived by the average man (24).
But the mind of the true medium pierces time and can “just as readily see what happened a thousand years ago as it recognizes what is now transpir-ing” (38– 39), especially if provided with some material object imprinted by the eye of the missing person.
For this reason Stanford remains conident that Clarke’s murderer can-not escape detection. “Blood sticks to such coin,” he remarks, and it “inally drives the unfortunate possessor into the depths of misery or into the hands of justice” (20). Unfortunately, this is not exactly true of Dr. Hypolite Meis-sonier, Magnétiseur, the villain with psychic powers who slaughtered Clarke for his money. We discover that the doctor’s criminal tendencies “were nur-tured and developed” in “the vivisection- rooms of Paris,” where the cruel-ties of the medical profession— experiments in poison, the dissection of the living, and other unimaginable horrors— “became familiar to us, then excusable, then interesting, and inally, monstrous to relate, even amusing and fascinating!” (129). Little wonder that Meissonier is content to make hu-mans the subjects of hypnotic suggestion and have them do his bidding. His assistant, Dr. Hilary Dupont, is putty in his hands, “a mere automaton” and slave who confesses that Meissonier’s “voice strikes me with terror; I have no power to disobey” (74, 262). Dupont is only an operative in Meissonier’s pay; nevertheless his actions are not his own. A “rascally mesmerizer” pos-sesses his body, and bringing this “vampire” to justice proves exceedingly dif-icult, especially because Meissonier’s coercions sap men and women of their wills without leaving a shred of evidence behind.
In A Mystery of New Orleans, Stanford’s “new methods” uncover the past when forensics and the evidence of the senses cannot. In doing so he wards of interracial union, but is powerless against the new order of slavery Meissonier has invented. Holcombe splices quandaries of race and region together with the detective’s case, regardless of Stanford’s race politics. But these same dabblings in metaphysics cover Meissonier’s tracks, since the doctor usurps the body of another and compels it to act as the “independent”
agent of an unseen master. Holcombe’s novel suggests that the “romance of reunion” is fraught with racial danger, and yet his northern protagonist is steadfast in the face of every southern devil’s advocate who favors
“volun-tary” segregation between the so- called superior and inferior races. Even in the epilogue to the novel Stanford demands, “Is not this [segregation] the spirit of slavery with the institution left out? And would it not reproduce the institution if that were practicable?” (321). Stanford’s faith in race equal-ity and the “new metaphysics” notwithstanding, the powers of a mesmerist like Meissonier are likely to reproduce the spirit of slavery by suppressing the question of consent. hat is, at “the deadest of dead ends” where a man is, contrary to all appearances, the mere mechanism of another’s mind, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether or not his working orders are written, as Stanford suggests of the past, in “invisible ink” (24).
163
Prescription
Homicide?
No ordinary physician, Rudolph Fisher earned a medical degree from How-ard University in 1924 and completed postgraduate research at Columbia University. A clergyman’s son who received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Brown University, he toured the eastern seaboard accompanying Paul Robe-son on the piano to raise funds for college. He was a roentgenologist who once held private practice on Long Island but had, since the onset of the Great Depression, worked as an X- ray technician at Harlem Hospital; he would die in 1934 at the age of thirty- seven from a stomach disorder caused by exposure to his own equipment. He was also a moderately acclaimed writer of the Harlem Renaissance who palled around with the likes of Alain Locke, and supposedly intimidated Langston Hughes with his sharp wit.1 Still, only a few documents in the Rudolph Fisher Papers at the John Hay Library at Brown University are written entirely in the author’s hand. In ad-dition to drafts of a few stories (“he Lindy Hop” and “Skeeter”), scattered notes, and the beginnings of a clearly polemical essay titled “White Writers of Current Black Fiction,” there is a sheet of paper titled only “he New Negro.”2 On this page, Fisher scrawled a free- form “medical” evaluation of a body of work that he dubbed “he novel of the life of the ‘new negro.’”
In his brief report, Fisher delineates the peculiarities of “Negro Life as Literary Material” according to three classes of descriptive symptoms of the
“Negro himself.” He begins with a list of books that treat the subject of the negro “Physically,” an inventory that contains Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bum, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Wallace hurman’s he Blacker the Berry, plus many more. he next column lists books that portray the negro “Spiritu-ally”: Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter, DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, Fauset’s he Chinaberry Tree, and so on. Finally there is his “Situation in
America,” a catalog comprising W. E. B. DuBois’s Dark Princess, George Schuyler’s Black No More, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, and Fisher’s own he Walls of Jericho, among others. Fisher’s diagnosis comes down to the “estimation of the condition of this body of literature,” likely a comment on the perceived aesthetic “failure” of the “Negro Renaissance” of the 1920s by the early 1930s (Hutchinson 8).3 But the doctor advises a regimen, be-ginning with “less of the poor little yaller gal, let’s have a comedy. More of conlicts about internal diversity— this— hidden in varieties of hair, huck-leberry to patent leather, and in degrees of pigmentation— chestnut, seal skin, brown . . . cream, light yellow, and pink.” Fisher’s literary prescription also includes additional emphasis on “resiliency” and calls for less stress on
“situation,” proposing a purposeful turn to what he calls “pigmentation of the brain, not skins.” And with an ultimate, sweeping lourish, an arrow points to the title of Fisher’s second and last book, a work of detective iction titled he Conjure- Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932).
Does this grand gesture indicate that Fisher intended to treat some inir-mity in a body of literary productions on the “he New Negro” with a text about the murder of one of its members? he Conjure- Man Dies is a “locked- room” (or rather “waiting- room”) puzzle that follows police detective Perry Dart and the physician John Archer in their joint eforts to inger the cli-ent who murdered the enigmatic African soothsayer N’Gana Frimbo— and their perplexing discovery, halfway through the book, that Frimbo staged his own death in anticipation of the assassin’s arrival. To date, critics have posi-tioned Fisher’s murder mystery as primarily a rejoinder to a white- authored tradition of detective iction writing. Stephen Soitos treats he Conjure- Man Dies as an instance of black “blues” detection whose distinct lineage can be traced to Pauline Hopkins’s serialized Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice and J. E. Bruce’s Black Sleuth. According to Soitos, we can dif-ferentiate these works from white- authored detective ictions based on their use of distinctly “black” detective themes, including “altered detective perso-nas, double- conscious detection, black vernaculars, and hoodoo” (93). Along these lines, Fisher’s version of the whodunit incorporates aspects of urban African American culture into the classical detective formula to renovate the genre, and even implies that a “meld of Afro- centric and Euro- Americentric views might be possible” in the person of its conjure- man— a possibility that is, however, dashed by N’Gana Frimbo’s actual assassination at the end of the book (116). Adrienne Gosselin ofers the more provocative claim that the
“Dusky Sherlock Holmes” in Fisher’s text is neither Perry Dart, the Harlem
police detective, nor his “Doctor Watson” John Archer, but the eponymous N’Gana Frimbo, whose soothsaying talents evoke the ratiocinative lair Ar-thur Conan Doyle assigns to Sherlock Holmes in his early novellas (610).
Consequently, Frimbo’s (second and real) death in the inal pages of the text represents, among other things, Fisher’s attempt to obliterate the kind of thinking pioneered by Sherlock Holmes as well as that sleuth’s iconic status,
“to reject the monolithic voice of Eurocentric classical detection by destroy-ing the genre’s most recognizable symbol” (617).
hese interpretations of he Conjure- Man Dies are predicated upon the text’s supposed antagonism with a genre whose most celebrated works ex-tol the deductive prowess of white male detectives. Additionally, they imply that Fisher appreciated his status as a generic interloper and took detective iction as the central object of his revisionary ambitions, helping to pioneer an alternate, oppositional tradition of black- authored detection texts. By contrast, this chapter foregrounds Fisher’s symbiotic engagement with the mechanisms of detection iction, proposing that the genre supplied an expe-dient wheel for spinning the literary material of Negro life. Unlike the works examined in other chapters of this study, he Conjure- Man Dies can be situ-ated simultaneously at the center and the margins of the detective genre, as it synthesizes concerns about interracial sociability typically explored on the genre’s peripheries while consolidating detective iction’s repertoire of generic elements in an exemplary “genre text.”
his chapter argues that he Conjure- Man Dies is a work of black mod-ernism whose exploration of interracial sociability takes place through its negotiation and use of a preexisting form. Not only does the text avail itself of detection’s devices to negotiate the racialized regulation of bodies and economies, the author’s deliberate engagement with its narrative- analytical tools (his detection “prescription”) airms the racial heterogeneity of the genre. Fisher exploits the sociopolitical subtexts of the “locked room” puzzle to generate a work of literary sociology that, in accordance with his recom-mendations for Negro literature, foregrounds the varieties of “blackness” in Depression- era Harlem, a setting the author once described as a “modern metropolis turned black” (City of Refuge 330). Moreover, while Fisher uses the rites of integration rooted in classical detective iction to assemble a
his chapter argues that he Conjure- Man Dies is a work of black mod-ernism whose exploration of interracial sociability takes place through its negotiation and use of a preexisting form. Not only does the text avail itself of detection’s devices to negotiate the racialized regulation of bodies and economies, the author’s deliberate engagement with its narrative- analytical tools (his detection “prescription”) airms the racial heterogeneity of the genre. Fisher exploits the sociopolitical subtexts of the “locked room” puzzle to generate a work of literary sociology that, in accordance with his recom-mendations for Negro literature, foregrounds the varieties of “blackness” in Depression- era Harlem, a setting the author once described as a “modern metropolis turned black” (City of Refuge 330). Moreover, while Fisher uses the rites of integration rooted in classical detective iction to assemble a